Seek the Traitor's Son, page 34
“We should begin,” she says.
“Are you sure you’re recovered enough?” he says to her, his eyes lingering on her bruised wrists.
“Your mother may have given you the impression that all the exiles but her were weak,” Julia says, with a small smile. “But I’ve endured worse than that sham of a kidnapping, Theren.” She tugs her cuffs down over the bruises. “Her Grace told me you have a memory gap?”
“Yes,” he says. “I think Rava brought someone in to bury a memory of mine. I’m not sure why, but it seems important that I know.”
“This process can be unpleasant,” Julia says. “I should be more specific: it will hurt. Like the worst headache you’ve ever had. And you’ll need to maintain control of your mind.”
He nods.
“What you need to do is focus on the very last thing you remember before the gap, and then the very first thing you remember afterward. Then I will try to . . . loosen, for lack of a better word . . . what’s between them.”
“And you’ll be able to see all of it?” he asks.
“Yes,” she replies. “But like I told you, Theren. You are one of ours. You can trust me.”
It has the neat clarity of truth to it. She stands, carries the chair over to the bed, and sits right in front of him, knee to knee.
“Let’s begin.”
38
In the memory, he sits on the edge of Rava’s bed, his heels propped on the frame. His back aches, and he still feels things crawling on him, as he does most mornings. On the bad days, he sits for an hour, waiting for the feeling to subside enough for him to take a shower. Today is one of the bad days.
He hears the door to the office open. He tenses, ready, but it’s not Rava. Whoever it is feels too nervous, too eager. He forces himself to get up and grab his shirt from the window seat. It’s only half-buttoned by the time he steps into the office.
The next room is colder, the fireplace dark and wind wheezing through the cracks between windows and wall. It chases the smell of paper away. There are so many books here. It would be his favorite room in House Vidar, if it didn’t contain so many bad memories.
Kesia stands just a few feet from the doorway, in leather trousers, a white shirt, same old boots. There’s a knife in a sheath at her hip. She stares at him, and her emotions crowd into him for a moment before he pushes them out, like he’s slamming a door.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he says to her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she says.
He’s surprised by how bitter he still feels toward her. How the sight of her is still poison. “And?”
“What are you . . .” She frowns at him. “Do you live here?”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Do you?”
It’s her tone of voice, quiet and soft, that makes him answer her.
“Yes,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to escort you to a meeting. Rava’s orders.”
“Fine. I’ll get my shoes.”
He turns away, about to walk through the door to the bedroom.
She says, “I thought you would be harder to persuade.”
He pauses with his hand on the doorframe, and looks at the wrinkled sheets where he sat a few minutes ago, trying to get himself to move.
“She calls, I answer,” he says. “Same as you.”
* * *
Julia Martin’s hands are on his, cool and strict. There’s a pounding behind one of his eyes.
“Good,” she says. “Now take me to the next thing you remember.”
* * *
Rock scrapes the skin of his palms. He’s standing in the hallway in House Vidar, braced against the wall. He’s sweaty, like he was just running—only he can’t remember where he came from, or where he was going. He wipes the back of his neck with his free hand, and then his forehead. He blinks tears from his eyes.
He recognizes the door he’s standing near as Rava’s office door. It has a brass handle, and there are scratches at the bottom from the cat that used to live here. He straightens, his hand slipping down as the door opens, and Rava stands in the doorway.
Her hair is loose over her shoulders, golden and wavy in places, straight in others. She’s not wearing shoes.
“Forint?” she says.
He blinks at her. His throat is raw. He has questions, but the words feel out of reach to him. She stretches out a hand, and he tenses, but doesn’t pull away as she lays her palm on his cheek. Checking his temperature, he thinks.
“You don’t look well,” she says. “Come.”
He follows her into the office.
* * *
“Prepare yourself,” Julia Martin says.
But there’s no preparing for this. He feels like someone put a chisel in his eye socket and pounded it deep into his brain. He screams into his teeth, unable to stop himself, and Julia’s hands tighten over his.
“Focus,” she says, and he hears Satka—
* * *
“Focus, idiot.”
Satka grabs him by the hair, and leans in close.
“As my teacher once said . . . let pain be the whetstone that sharpens the blade of you.”
She slams his head back into the ground.
* * *
“Focus!”
* * *
A hand presses into his shoulder, forcing him to his knees. Dazed, he doesn’t resist. The journey here, to Ileth Vidar’s estate, passed in a blur of sound, Rava talking to Ranos and Satka about the Battle of Calgara where she made a name for herself as a butcher, and in their mouths it’s just the reminiscence of soldiers, but he knows it was a slaughter.
But now he’s here, Rava standing behind him, and she’s terrified, something he would have sworn up until that moment was impossible. Could a woman like Rava fear anything? Apparently she could.
He sees Ileth’s shoes, first, and they’re black boots, unscuffed, polished to shine. She wears black fitted clothes. Her wrists and her throat are draped in stones—deep blue opals, left jagged and unpolished. Her hair is as pale as Rava’s, and she has Rava’s aquiline nose. But her eyes are brown, close-set, like a bird.
She looks down at him, and smiles. Her voice is pleasant, almost unctuous.
“At last we meet,” she says. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Forint.”
* * *
Theren tries to yank his hands away from Julia Martin, and she holds on tighter.
“Go back to the last thing you remember before the gap,” she commands. “I will bring out the rest.”
His head burns—
* * *
“She calls, I answer,” he says to Kesia. “Same as you.”
He puts on his boots, changes his shirt into one that’s not as creased, and checks his hair in the bathroom mirror. He catches Kesia peering through the crack in the door, trying to see into the bedroom. When he emerges, she looks startled by how close he is, or perhaps how big he is now, Fever-changed and far deadlier than the child she trained on Cedre Station.
“Lead the way.” He gestures toward the door.
She tucks her hair behind both ears, and turns away from him. She used to make him feel like a slip of a person; now she looks spare to him, and small. He wonders if time has taken some of her sturdiness from her, if she’s found a harder life here than she expected to, or if he’s just changed that much. He tries not to give a damn either way, but it’s a hard habit to break, caring about your own mother.
“I’m stationed at the monastery now,” she says, as they climb the steps. They pass one of the cooks, who nods to Theren, and the sitting room with the blue rug that Ranos uses for his morning stretches. They walk beneath a portrait of the emperor, and Theren feels his eyes following them down the hallway.
“Sometimes I work with your friend Orda,” she adds.
She’s baiting him. Trying to pique his curiosity, make him ask a question. He’s silent as they climb. She leads him down a short corridor where an unfamiliar soldier stands guard. He wears the seal of the Vidari on his sleeve, a halo of vines.
“He’s unarmed?” the soldier says to Kesia.
“Yes,” she replies, and the soldier opens the door for Theren.
He steps into one of the guest suites. This part of the house is on top of the peak, rather than built into the face of it, so it’s all made of wood, polished and carved into organic shapes, leaves and flowers and branches. There’s a low stove in the corner, and sitting in a chair beside it, her head turned toward the window, is an augur.
Not just an augur. The augur. The one he met at the Getty.
Rava isn’t there. Not yet, anyway. Just the augur, and Kesia at Theren’s back.
“Come here, boy,” the augur says to him.
He’s afraid to read her. He’s never read anyone who could see the future before. But what he finds is nothing new. She’s afraid. Angry. He suspects she’s not here because she wants to be; this guest suite is an elegant prison for her.
He stayed upright when he met her before, in the Getty. This time when he draws closer to her, he bows with the reverence of the Talusar. She leans forward and studies his face, as he studies hers. She looks the same as he remembers, her nose dotted with freckles, her skin crinkled around the eyes but otherwise smooth.
“I saw this moment when we met before,” she says. “It was fresh in my mind when I looked at your younger self. You’ve changed so much.”
He knows he looks different now, but he can’t imagine what it was like for her to see two versions of him layered over each other like a screen over a window.
“Why . . . why do you see me?” he says, not sure he wants the answer.
She tilts her head. “Some people I see once, and never again. Some people, though, keep showing up again and again, and it’s hard to understand why. That was true of you, at first. As far as I could tell, the only remarkable thing about you was what the Fever did through you.” Her voice lowers, softens. “And then I realized . . . that’s exactly it. Nine people on this planet can do what I do, and that’s rare enough. But only one person can do what you do.”
The door opens behind him, and he turns to see Rava, her blond hair braided in its usual crown, her gray sweater neatly tucked, her worn boots tied tightly at her ankles.
“My lady,” he says, and he inclines his head to her.
She pulls the door closed behind her, and stands with her back against it. Her eyes skirt his, and he realizes: she’s nervous.
The augur folds her spotted hands over her belly and studies Rava. Theren has never seen someone look at her that way, with derision instead of fear. And he’s never seen Rava tolerate it before, either.
“You haven’t told him,” the augur says.
“That’s not your concern.”
“It is if you want my help.”
“You may be misunderstanding the situation you’re in,” Rava says.
“I assure you, I understand it perfectly,” the augur replies. “This is a negotiation. You kidnapped me, and then offered me my release in exchange for my help. That was your initial offer. And now I’m telling you that I’ll only accept that offer if you give me something else in return: you must face reality. I think you’ll accept my terms because you want my assistance ever so slightly more than I want my freedom. So.” The augur leans back in her chair. “Am I right, Rava?”
Rava’s eyes are not cold, exactly, but flat. Fear prickles down his spine at the sight. It usually precedes violence, but he can’t imagine even Rava Vidar, secret Talusar apostate, hurting an augur.
“Tell him, then,” Rava says.
“Coward,” the augur says, with a harsh laugh. The collective anger in the room is thick enough to choke on. The augur leans forward in her chair and looks up at him. When the sun hits her face directly, he sees little hints of the past everywhere: a pockmark in her cheek, a piercing in her earlobe, a scar beneath her chin.
“Three years ago the augurs offered Rava Vidar a path to Talusar victory,” the augur says. “One of the signposts along that path was a man. When asked how she would be able to identify that man, we told her she would be in love with him.” The augur’s brow furrows. “By whatever definition of love makes sense to her, that is. We do not all love equally well.”
At first, Theren only hears the words passing over him like a wind ruffling his hair. He wonders why she’s telling him this, and he feels dread of the answer, almost in the same moment. But he can’t stop his mind from piecing it together. Rava’s averted eyes. The vine symbol inked on his hand.
He feels like he’s going to vomit.
He thought his presence in Rava’s house was mere happenstance. That her greed, her paranoia, had driven her to acquire him like a new weapon, eager to use his gift. But to hear that he’s here because of her pursuit of destiny, that his presence is in any way fated—it makes him feel sick.
She’s in love with him.
“I’m sorry to do this to you,” the augur says to him. “But I wanted her to have to see your reaction to this, in the hope that it will help her come to terms with who she is and what she’s done. A feeble hope, perhaps, but . . .”
“Stop,” he says. “Stop, please.”
He’s hunched over a little, like an animal protecting its soft belly. He brings a hand up to his mouth—he can feel a scream rising in his throat, or maybe that’s bile. Either way, he needs to keep it in, needs to stay contained, needs to—
“Have I met your requirements?” Rava says. “Can we stop wasting time?”
He doesn’t want to read her. He can’t. But even without the depth that the Fever gave to his perceptions, he knows her well enough to hear the unsteadiness in her voice.
Nothing has changed, he tells himself. However Rava feels, whatever reason she had for bringing him to House Vidar—the outcome is the same. He’s here. He’s enduring his time in this house the same way he was yesterday and the day before. Nothing has changed, nothing has changed.
“Very well,” the augur says. “We can begin, then.”
Rava nods, and pulls away from the door just enough to open it. “Bring him in,” she says to the guard in the hallway.
“I told you all that was required for this was the meeting of past, present, and future,” the augur says, sounding confused. “The three of us meet those requirements.” The augur tilts her head. “Or are we still pretending that you’re not an epocha?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rava says, and Theren expected no different. Rava Vidar knows better than most that the best way to pass off a lie is to never admit it’s a lie, not even for a moment.
The augur sighs. Theren is too busy trying to breathe to react to this confirmation of what he’s always suspected: that Rava’s gifts aren’t as singular as the Talusar think. That she belongs locked up in a monastery with all the other epocha, and only enjoys the freedom she now has because her mother is Ileth Vidar. It seems the least of the secrets she’s kept.
“Kneel,” Rava says to Theren, and in the last year, he’s noticed that she gives this order when she’s concerned that he’ll react badly to something and she’ll lose control over him, that his size and strength will suddenly become a problem. So he obeys, but with a hammer for a heart, anticipating what’s coming.
A man walks into the room. He’s wearing a blue robe embroidered, not with the interlinked circles of the Fever, as a priest’s robe would be, but with the twin silver lines of an epocha.
Theren doesn’t have the Talusar’s reverence for the epocha, but he understands what’s expected of him. He bows his head when the epocha lowers his hood, but not before he recognizes the epocha’s face.
“Theren,” the epocha says.
Theren closes his eyes.
It’s Fenn.
The ache he feels is so intense he has to press a hand to his gut to steady himself. He feels the brush of Rava’s fear against him, but she shouldn’t have worried—lying to him about Fenn’s death is just one in a long line of painful things she’s done to him. It hardly registers.
What registers instead is Fenn himself. Fenn alive. Fenn, elated at the sight of him, even though Theren betrayed him to save his life. Fenn drops to his knees and puts his hands on Theren’s shoulders.
“You’re alive,” Theren says weakly.
“I’m sorry,” Fenn says. “I’m so sorry, I asked them to tell you I was dead in case I was the reason you hadn’t run away yet.”
Fenn looks older than he did the last time Theren saw him, thinner and sterner, his eyes carrying far too much history. Yet the way he talks, the way his smile looks hard-won, like it was carved from a frown—it’s the same.
“It doesn’t matter.” And it doesn’t, it can’t matter, because Theren is sure they only have a few minutes with each other, because he can feel the thread of Rava’s patience pulling taut. “I’m the one who’s sorry, anyway.”
Their dalliance was short-lived. Two Crucible fighters desperate for comfort, finding it where they could. It ended before Fenn’s arrest, when Theren noticed, as only he could have, that Fenn’s feelings were getting deeper and his own weren’t. Fenn took the end of it in stride. Ah, well. We’ll be dead soon anyway. A phrase that couldn’t quite disguise his hurt—but it was a hurt that would pass.
But betraying him to Rava, telling everyone that he was an epocha? That was a hurt that would linger.
“I told you I’ve never hated you,” Fenn says, with a breathy laugh. “I still mean it. I always will.”
